Any ex-theists on here? I would be interested to get a discussion going on why you began to lose faith and turn to atheism.

Most miracles dealt with healing. These were not televangelist-style healing. Most were in private settings. In retrospect they were mostly things where the healing was more mind-over-matter recoveries. I had some of them happen to me. Probably the most dramatic was a shoulder separation that was diagnosed by my doctor, but which seemed to be repaired completely after laying-on-of-hands. I really don't have a good explanation for it even today other than maybe my mind blocking the pain. I did go to bed shortly after the healing, so maybe there was enough repair overnight that I could function the next day (I was on crutches at the time because of ankle surgery, so a bad shoulder would have required me to drop out of school).

None of the healings I knew of involved anything really dramatic like limbs being restored or people being raised from the dead. But back then everyone at church seemed to know someone who knew someone who had witnessed someone being raised from the dead. Most of this kind of stuff happened when I was young, so back in the 1960's and very early 1970's. Our denomination was pretty conservative, and got progressively more liberal. As they did that they really discouraged the talk of miraculous healings and such. We lost a lot of members as the church liberalized because people were refusing to change or thought that change was coming too fast. On the other hand I think I was actually changing much faster than the church, especially in the last 10 years or so.

On thing that was consistent in our church was expectations of the truth being confirmed "in your heart" after praying and studying. I did feel like I got a lot of definite answers over the years. But others also got answers that were in direct conflict with mine. These were from people I knew and respected, so I had no doubt that they "testimony" of the revelation was no less real than mine. I found it very hard to rationalize how the same god and same truth would be revealed and confirmed to be exactly the opposite. The only real explanation that I could come to is that our subconscious mind eventually provides the confirmation of what we had already decided we wanted the truth to be. Moving beyond my own denomination there are other people in other denominations and even entirely different religions that also feel that truth has been revealed to them. Not all of them can be right, but it is certainly possible that they are all wrong.

/r/atheism Thread